Space-time voice activity detection

When speech-based interfaces are used for small handheld devices such as cellular phones and personal digital assistants in mobile environments with unknown noises and surrounding talkers, all signals except the legitimate users voice must be rejected as noise signals by the system. This paper proposes a new algorithm that detects the users voice in spatial and temporal domains using directional and spectral information. It rejects undesirable signals that originate from noise sources or surrounding talkers. Experimental results indicate the proposed algorithm reduces the voice activity detection error rate by 34.3% relative to the conventional methods.